Reflections on Teaching

After reading Kim Cofino’s excellent explanation of the essential understandings for 21st Century and the posts that followed, I am wrestling with the issue of how to make these skills attainable and usable by all students. Kim’s synthesis and exploration of three main concepts (Effective Learner, Effective Collaborator, and Effective Creator) are so articulate and useful. I would agree with Julie Lindsay’s post that Effective Communicator should be its own category because there are so many discrete skills involved in successful communication, especially when one is communicating across cultures.
One of the challenges I wonder about is how to make goals that require such dynamic skills sets attainable to all our students. This meta level of learning seems central to the “Effective Learner/Collaborator/Creator” goals of 21st century literacy. Mrs. Durff’s reference to Toffler’s assertion about the necessity to be able to learn, unlearn, and relearn, while being an exciting concept, poses difficulties for those kids for whom learning in the first place is a challenge. Which begs the question, just how can we as teachers help all our students succeed in the 21st century. Indeed, how can we make sure they will not only “survive”, as Mrs. Durff writes, but actually thrive?
As with any effective teaching, differentiation is critical to truly facilitating the learning of individual students. Although the internet opens up a host of possible interests to motivate even traditionally dispossessed students, I struggle with the issue of how to make these skills accessible and “ownable” by the more challenged learners. Can there be 21st century literacy for all?

I am struck by this idea discussed by Rick and Marcia that blogging is more than journaling, more than a static reflection. I like thinking of all this as using journaling as a forum for introducing people to ideas with which they may find a connection in their own lives.

When a writer publishes a printed work, it is perhaps  a kind of unrequited conversation in which the writer’s words are reflections on his or her own life/ideas. The reader than reads the words and, hopefully, forges connections between what is written by the author and what is lived/thought by the reader. But however inspirational the experience for the writer or the reader, it is, for both, one-sided, not something they can share with one another (at least not in an immediate sense).

It seems to me that this blogging realm has the power to bring those reflections (made by the writer) and those connections (made by the reader) into active relationship with one another in –nearly– real time.  This “nearly real time” aspect is important I think as it allows the writer and the reader to take part in both the reading and the writing within the time of their choosing so that they may express their thoughts with more care and craft than is often possible in an actual real-time conversation.

Another interesting kind of “connection” this makes possible is the actual connections the writer can offer the reader by linking words to other references, other sources through the “hyper” connectivity of the medium. This connectivity raises this kind of writing beyond the linearity of “just” journaling…in fact, I’d argue that this medium is the truest kind of journaling because it is capable of embodying the vast web of connections in a writer’s mind that accompanies any single written thought.

Having “said” all this, I find that I have run out of time to take advantage of the possibilities and have only a single active link to weave into my writing…but if any reader wishes to reflect or connect, I invite the conversation!

My raison d’etre for being in this blogging start-up, my rationalization for whittling time away from reading student writing, scribbling fragments of poems, and wrestling with my 18 month old in order to participate in this blogging adventure is this: I want more. I want more structure and context to my thinking, I want more depth and breadth to my professional conversations, I want more ways to connect and be connected to the world of thought. I want to be part of an intellectual feedback loop, the kind of active dialogue I hope to inspire in my students. I trust my blog-knowledgeable colleagues when they assure me that “plugging in” will bring me all of this, and more.

As a writer, a language arts teacher, and a member of my middle school’s Technology Committee, it is high time I enter the world of blogging. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be exploring the possibilities with the KMS Bloggers, a group of like-minded colleagues looking for new tools with which to expand professional horizons. Once I’m adequately equipped to do so, I hope to springboard from these neophyte efforts into the wider world of inquiry and inspiration around issues of education. To my fellow KMS Bloggers, and whoever else finds these reflections worth reflecting on, and responding to, please check back often!
-Sylvie Essex